Natl Review

Jesse vs. Al The power struggle.

By Rod Dreher, columnist, New York Post June 25, 2001 9:00 a.m. hose of you residing outside the New York metropolitan media market are missing one of the great comedies of American political life, playing out in jailhouses in Brooklyn and Vieques (which, given the amount of press that dismal Puerto Rican island gets here, may as well be the sixth borough).

We mean, of course, the folie a deux taking place between the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the self-styled Caesar of black America, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, his pompadoured Brutus. The real meaning of the tin-pot psychodrama playing out between the eminent Negro divines will not be clear until Tom Wolfe sorts it all out for us in a future novel. May the good Lord hasten that day; until then, here's a scorecard for you handicappers.

First, a little back-story: Jackson, as you'll recall, ran into trouble earlier this year when forced to acknowledge that he had fathered a child out of wedlock with a former employee. Sharpton rushed to his mentor's defense, hosting a "prayer meeting" for Jackson in a Harlem church, on the eve of his Wall Street Project conference, his annual shakedown of Manhattan's pusillanimous pinstripers.

As we later learned from The Village Voice, Sharpton's associate, the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, lambasted Jackson for disgracing his church by turning what was supposed to be a prayer meeting into a political rally. And Walker privately blistered Sharpton's backside for the debacle as well.

It was around this time that associates of Sharpton, who has a shark-like skill for smelling a drop of opportunity a mile away, began leaking damaging information about Jackson to the media through associates.

As Jackson's negative press increased, Sharpton grew bolder, and began to talk openly about succeeding Jackson. When criticism of Jackson's silence regarding slavery in Sudan began to bubble up, Sharpton announced he was going to Africa to investigate the problem for himself and denounced Jackson in all but name.

That trip was genuinely a brave thing for Sharpton to have done. He really did fly illegally into a war zone, which is also a cauldron of infectious disease, and sleep on the ground at night. He bore witness to immense suffering, and came back promising to fight for the rights of the wretched black slaves of that forlorn nation.

Which — "surprise!" — he has not done. Instead, he declared that he had an epiphany under a Sudanese baobab tree, or somesuch thing, and decided destiny was calling him to run for U.S. president. This was his first mistake: He came across as a hasty amateur, too desperate by half to knock off King Jesse, who, whatever his faults, had spent years mastering Democratic party politics.

It didn't help that Sharpton turned around and, trying to be kingmaker of New York's ethnic politics, shot his political foot off by making humiliating racial demands of Puerto Rican mayoral candidate Freddie Ferrer, the Bronx borough president. Sharpton quickly moved to recover by going to Vieques in early May and getting arrested while trespassing on the bombing range.

Sharpton, a veteran of New York's photo-op celebrity-protest culture, didn't count on a tough Puerto Rican judge, who gave him 90 days in the clink. He has been allowed to serve it in a Brooklyn jail, where he whined about maltreatment for days until it began to sink in that his stretch in jail was an investment in his activist future. The Rotund Rev, as the Post loves to call him, has been on a hunger strike for several weeks.

Everyone expected Sharpton to eat contraband Milky Ways, but he appears to have been keeping to his fast. He has lost an impressive amount of weight. But he went woozy in a TV interview with Fox News last week, and made an impressive gaffe, in the Kinsleyan sense of the word, i.e., the accidental telling of an impolitic truth.

When the reporter asked the Mandela of our time if the Tawana Brawley imbroglio would hurt his presidential chances, he hotly retorted, "I did not take the blood of the guy I loved and put it on my shirt." He was referring, of course, to the claim made by some of Martin Luther King Jr.'s associates that Jackson crassly took advantage of King's assassination for personal aggrandizement.

That is the Great Unmentionable in elite black politics, and Sharpton was roundly denounced by black leaders. After Sharpton's weak attempt to blame the mess on media bias (but Fox had the tape!), Johnnie Cochran paid a jailhouse visit to the Reducing Rev, and emerged with a groveling apology to Jackson, an assertion of racial solidarity, and an accusation that the media was trying to create a "power struggle" between the two men.

It was an unnecessary gesture, a pathetic gesture, and ultimately a hypocritical one. Sharpton, after all, had only spoken the truth about what a phony Jackson is, and alluded to how the media let him get away with a disgraceful past. And Sharpton himself has spent the entire spring creating the power struggle with Jackson, both covertly and overtly.

"You have to remember that Al has a lot of respect for the authority figures in his life," a friend of Sharpton's told me. "When Johnnie Cochran came to see him, Al deferred to him. That's Al."

Plainly, Sharpton punked out. Ambitious though he may be, Sharpton lacks the confidence to do the deed that would dispatch Jackson to the dustbin of history. Sharpton will never be bigger than the five boroughs. The poor republic.

However, the street-savvy Sharpton's weaselly challenge to Jackson's leadership role in black America has put the arrogant Jackson on notice. Sharpton's antics have revealed Jesse as a comfortable creature of Wall Street, not the loud-and-proud advocate for the ghetto's Main Street. Can anybody remember the last time Jesse Jackson spent the night in jail for anything? He may have put Sharpton in his place for the bloody-shirt comment, but Sharpton is controlling the agenda between the two men.

Clearly, Sharpton has been stealing Jackson's thunder with his Vieques activism. A source close to the Jackson camp says the preacher is eaten up with jealousy over the jailed Sharpton's media profile. But Jackson can't pay Sharpton a compliment by getting himself arrested in Vieques.

So he's pulled an even better stunt: He's sent his wife, Jacqueline, down to the island, where she's gotten herself thrown into the pokey on trespassing charges. No sooner had Mrs. Jackson been apprehended by Puerto Rican authorities than she began caterwauling about the jailhouse conditions there. Mrs. Jackson is a limousine liberal of the Lori Berenson variety, the sort of left-wing dilettante who inserts herself illegally into Latin American political situations, then screams injustice when she is treated like a Latin American lawbreaker.

Here, though, was the chance for the randy Reverend to redeem himself by winning the freedom of his wife. The most recent "JacksFax, "a weekly dispatch sent to supporters, refers with a cornpone grandiosity to Jackie Jackson as the "Rainbow/PUSH's First Lady," and reports that Jesse is demanding a meeting with President Bush to "discuss the release of the First Lady."

Bush, to his great credit, is having none of Jesse Jackson. He seems to be the only powerful white man in America unafraid of the disgraced race hustler. He has rebuffed numerous attempts by Jackson to get into the White House in an attempt to rebuild his image as black America's power broker. Instead, Bush has been pursuing a much more progressive and realistic strategy of meeting with a number of relatively unknown black leaders, men and women who rarely make the papers because lazy reporters have the whorish Jackson and Sharpton on speed dial.

So where are we today? The inept Sharpton's efforts to turn himself into the new Jesse have stalled because of his coarseness and lack of discipline. Even if Jackson were to implode, Sharpton has not demonstrated the polish and gravitas to wear Jackson's crown. For his part, Jackson continues to be protected by his media and big-business friends (the recent Lou Dobbs interview on CNN was revoltingly obsequious), but he has not been able to shake the stink of scandal either. He can't seem to get back on track.

And it's about to get worse. That long-rumored 60 Minutes hit piece is still in the works, and a new name has surfaced that could become extremely important to Jackson's future: Kevin Ingram. Ingram, a black Wall Streeter and big Jackson donor, was just arrested for arms dealing. You read about the Ingram-Jackson connection here first.

Sharpton and Jackson may reach an uneasy détente, but the real question is: Who cares? The day is passing, and may even have passed, when black Americans need to look to one leader to speak for them. Jesse and Al are fighting over leadership of a diminished and increasingly out-of-touch movement (How many black Americans care about Vieques anyway)? Meanwhile, more and more African Americans move into the middle and upper classes, and assume leadership positions in their own worlds.

The two would-be top dogs of black America bark, but the caravan moves on.

-- Anonymous, June 25, 2001